I Have a Cunning Plan...

A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach

V1#14 - Aug-6-2019

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS. As I write this, it's early August, I've made the final reservations for the upcoming vacation and I am now in the middle of "okay, what has to be done before we drive north?"

I did survive the company trip to Boulder, and what little I saw of Boulder (mostly out the window of Lyft cars taking me to group dinners) I really liked. I was a bit worried how well I'd handle the altitude and while I was a bit puffy the first day, I adapted pretty quickly and did fine. What I didn't adapt as well to was that it was 90% every freaking day so whenever I went outside I started to broil (hence using Lyft more and walking less than my co-workers, who were very understanding, when they weren't hitching rides).

Next up is our vacation where we're taking off for ten days and driving to Victoria and back, crossing on our old friend the Coho out of Port Angeles. This is a trip we've made many times over the years, although for complicated reasons, the last time was 2005, and we've been talking about going back ever since.

We almost went two years ago, but I backed out because I wasn't sure if I could handle the walking, and we ended up at Kaloloch Lodge in Olympic National Park instead, which was a fun diversion. This year, I may still not be up to the walking but I'm in better shape then I've been in years and I figure it's time to stop being afraid of what might be and go and just make things work.

One thing I plan on doing while up there is something we have never done in Victoria, which is take a whale watching cruise. Why haven't we done that in all the visits in the past?

I have no idea, other than we just never got around to it. This time, I will. Also planned is dinner with friends in Duncan, lunch with a photographer friend/mentor who lives on the island, and trips out to Campbell River to explore and Butchart Gardens to enjoy and maybe take some photos.

And then home, and soon after, a drive back north to Olympic National Park for a few days at a photo workshop with Art Wolfe. Which much to my surprise, I'm actually pretty much done with planning and prep for. Given how the year's been, I think that's an indication how I finally have gotten on top of all of the things that I've felt were two weeks late this year...

And now I'm starting to do the early planning for my photography work this winter in the wildlife refuges, trying to define the gaps in my image collection I want to fill and see how often and where I'm going to visit.

On with the Show!

And with that, on with the show! And thank you for being part of this.

What's New?

Here is what I've written since the last issue:

  • Mastering Bird Photography: The Art, Craft, and Technique of Photographing Birds and Their Behavior -- finally a bird photography book I can recommend to everyone without reservations.

  • Half dome from Washburn Point, Yosemite National Park

  • Let’s Talk About Fear (if you read nothing else, read this)

  • Savannah Sparrow, Coyote Valley, California

  • Trusting the Process

  • Pigeon Point Lighthouse

  • Are you a Hoader or a Purger?

  • Barn Swallow Conflicts

  • The Permanence of your Photography

  • Sea Lions Arguing

  • Recognizing limits and finding ways past them

  • White-Faced Ibis bathing

  • Charities: Let me tell you to stop wasting paper and postage on me.

As I think you can tell, I've finally gotten my writing back on track and happening on a reliable basis again. How I did that is in fact the topic of conversation a bit below....

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Photos: Barn Swallow Conflicts

What happens when you have two barn swallows and one good perch? An argument. Here we have a barn swallow sitting on the best perch in the area. Unfortunately, incoming claws first is another barn swallow, who really wants to use the perch. 

If you were that perching barn swallow, what would you do? As it turns out this was the third attempt by the incoming swallow to attempt to dislodge the percher, and it deftly avoided the incoming claws and gave a solid bite to one of the toes, much to the dismay of the flying swallow, who gave up and flew away, leaving the perch to the defender. 

Who, five minutes later, took off to return to its hunt for bugs along the nearby slough.

I Have a Cunning Plan...

What do you need when you have a blog, a mailing list, various social media accounts and followers who want to hear what you think? 

Well, as I've been proving by my relative quiet, you need time where you can spend creating content that's good enough to share with others without embarrassment. That's been a rare commodity for me the last few months (for "reasons" -- good reasons, but still...). In the last month I finally saw the time crunch ending and I realized I could start not just wishing I could get stuff written for the blog, but actually doing it. 

But... Once you get past that point, how do you get things written regularly and reliably without turning it into another mad dash to deadlines rat race?

You need..... A Plan. (da-da-dum! <--- bad horror movie music).

If the goal is to turn out good material reliably -- and I think it's important to do that if you want to be fair to your readers and be taken seriously -- you need to sit down and figure out what you want to accomplish, and then come up with a plan on how you can do that within the schedule of your life. 

The reality is that even for a relatively small setup like mine, there are still a bunch of moving parts and the content monster is always hungry. There are weeks when maybe I can get four or five pieces written, and other weeks where I barely look at the blog, much less sit down and write for it. That kind of binge and purge is unfair to readers and yourself, and I've found if I post too many things too quickly readership on all of them goes down -- so it's in everyone's best interest, and especially for my own sanity, to decide on a regular cadence and get everything going out on a schedule. It also manages the load to a steady state so I know about how many hours a week I need to reserve to make it happen -- and if I have spare time, I always have the opportunity to write ahead, I can pre-load content for the future, and that gives me the ability to skip busy times without sweating a deadline or two. 

All of this takes thinking through and understanding what you are trying to accomplish, then building a plan to do it, and then creating a set of processes that help you actually get it done. I thought it might be interesting to talk a bit about how I did that.

Why am I here?

The first thing you need to sort out is why you're doing this. Because I feel I have something interesting to say is a perfectly acceptable, if generic, answer and a good starting point, but I like trying to have goals in mind and define plans against them so I have sone sense if I'm succeeding. YMMV, of course.

I actually sat down and spent a few hours working out what it was I was trying to do. The executive summary:

  • I want to share my knowledge and opinions about photography and other topics so they can see them and decide if they are something they want to use.

  • I want to start sharing my images more widely and get them out into the world for people to see (and search engines to index and share). I've been really bad about that for a while, and it's time to get serious about it again.

  • I want to use social media to help share what I do and widen the audience of those who see it, without being annoying while doing it.

So it basically starts with the blog, which is part writing and part photographs.

For the images, my favorite model is G. Dan Mitchell, who posts a photo a day with a description and details. I've felt the way he handles this is the way I want to handle it as well; in my case, though, I didn't feel like I wanted to do a daily post, but I definitely wanted a regular cadence. I ended up deciding that twice a week made sense, with Fridays being for my bird photography (Feathery Friday! Cute, huh?) and Wednesdays being for everything else, which is primarily landscape type work. These are actually easy to pre-schedule, and in fact, I've got images queued and ready to go into September now as I have been doing prep this weekend for the vacation and the photography workshop. It's something I won't have to think about again for over a month, when I'll do another batch to finish me into October when my travel will end for a while.

For the writing, the big question is how much can I sustainably do every week? If I look at my past, I know a lot of my blog work runs to about 1,500 +- 500. It feels like about the right length for me, and longer writing often gets skipped over or skimmed by readers, so it's not unusual to take a longer piece and split it into multiple smaller parts and post over time. Did I want to commit to three pieces a week? I probably could, but I felt more comfortable doing two: that's 4,000 words a week, more or less, and again, if there's extra time I can write to get ahead so when things get busy I am ready for some of those deadlines.

All of this will take me between 4-8 hours a week, something I've validated by timing myself this weekend as I do the work needed to get ahead of things for the vacation. Sometimes writing takes longer and needs more research, and sometimes I need to reprocess and images before I want to post it, but I can expect this to be closer to 4 hours than 8 most weeks. That's 1-2 evenings, or an evening and a half-day on the weekend, and with that, there'll be blog posts on Monday and Thursday, photos on Wednesday and Friday, and I can do something special on a Tuesday if I feel like it. I generally don't schedule posts on the weekend because readership is lower as people are doing other things than stare at computers, believe it or not.

Making it Happen

Now I know what I want to do. How to make it actually happen? I need a way to get nagged to remind me when stuff needs to get done. For that, I decided to use my handy To Do list system. I use Todoist for this these days and really like it. my data exists on all my devices and on the web, so I can access it anywhere. it lets me set due dates, it lets me set repeating events, and it can toss notifications to my devices to remind me when things are due or coming due. I also have an ongoing "next 7 days" view to help me see what's coming and arrange time to make them happen.

If I happen to finish a task early -- click "done" and it pushes forward to the next due day. So if I post three bird images in a row, all I need to do is click it as done three times and it won't show up again until the first due date after that third image.

So to schedule myself to get the above done, I've created four tasks:

  • Monday Blog Post (every Saturday)

  • Thursday Blog Post (every Saturday)

  • Wednesday Landscape Photo (every Saturday)

  • Friday Bird Photo (every Saturday)

So when I wake up Saturday morning, these tasks are staring at me. I also see them coming on the 7 day view, so if I can finish them early, I tick them as done and they disappear to the next Saturday.

That makes it almost painless. I see the tasks coming; I can finish them early or schedule them for the weekend. If I realize it's not going to happen, I can defer it and it disappears for the week and I don't have it staring at me and judging me. The best part? Once it's set up, it takes almost no time to manage and yet I have a quick place to look to see the status of what needs to be done so I can make sure I find the time to do it.

I use this technique for many of my ongoing things, whether it's reminding myself to send out meeting reminders and minutes for committees I chair or handling the social media things I want to post every week. For those, I have a set of tasks like:

  • Post 6FPS plug (every Saturday)

  • Post Siliconvalleybirder plug (every Saturday)

  • Post the "from the archive" link (every Saturday - for an older post I want to surface again)

  • Post the Monday "where did you bird" post to the Facebook page (every Saturday)

  • Update the events to the Facebook page (every Saturday)

The last two are for a Facebook page for a group I volunteer time to and the rest of things I want to make sure happen on twitter on a regular basis, and those are all written and scheduled through Hootsuite.

I've found a bit of organization saves me a lot of stress and churn as I try to remember and keep ahead of deadlines. I'm also a big believer in not automating things where the automation will take more to implement than I'll ever save in returned time. Todoist for things like this works wonderfully for me, because it's quick and easy to implement -- once you understand what needs to be done -- and managing it takes almost no time or energy or thought. The more manual shenanigans you need to keep your "automated" process going, the more likely you'll abandon it, so keep it simple and keep it easy....

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For Your Consideration

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

Coming out about every two weeks, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Know someone who might want to subscribe? Send them here. You'll also find the archives there if you want to look at previous issues.

See you soon!

And with that, I'll see you in a couple of weeks with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along.

Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq (chuqvr@gmail.com)

(P.S.: some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does pay for my site hosting every month, and maybe a coffee or two. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.)

Copyright © 2019 Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.